General News - RPGS: How Far Have We Come @ Hellforge

What happens when a former Hellgate: London fansite plays some old classics and compares them to Oblivion? This:

Our old geezer RPG group would label this as "shallow" and "easy," undermining the idea behind what an RPG is, citing about how in Baldur's Gate you can get lost right from the start of the game. Of course, that was the point, wasn't it? Why Baldur's Gate is only a cult classic? I mean, scratch the generic and boring plot that unfolds at the beginning of the game that is even a mystery to the player, but after you leave that city you may as well be stumbling around in the dark like Ray Charles. I don't know about you but that's not my idea of fun, which is a central theme in games I hear, and, sure enough, I chucked Baldur's Gate to the side after a half hour into the game, lost, and constantly getting killed. That cryptic journal with zero directions wasn't "fun" either.

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More information.

I wonder if this guy was even playing Baldur's Gate since his description is nothing like the game. It is way easier to get lost in a game like Oblivion then in Baldur's Gate and how can you be getting killed constantly in this game only a half hour into playing it unless you were just standing still letting the enemies kill you.

how can you be getting killed constantly in this game only a half hour into playing it

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Hmmm... Lord knows I love computer games based on the D&D rules, but one of the hallmarks of the earlier ones was that they pretty much assumed you knew what you were doing. Now, that worked pretty good because we (PC game playing nerds) mostly knew the D&D rules inside out. But imagine you didn't know a rogue from a cleric, and you started BG with a mage with low int and con, etc., instead of expertly crafting a charcter the way we all have been doing so easily for a decade or two.

I don't remember how BG worked exactly, but couldn't a newbie find himself with like 4hp? Because the <in some ways stupid> D&D rules did allow such a thing, despite our being shielded from it by our expertise with the system.

On the other hand if you're new to the game wouldn't you be spending most of that half hour in candlekeep? To get lost and killed repeatadly in half an hour you'd pretty much have to ignore everything and head directly out 'thataway'!

Even after leaving candlekeep the first wilderness area is so easy and even if you screwed up your character you still shouldn't have a problem since you have a companion and soon companions.

The first difficulty in BG is the assassin near the mines. (And only if you're a mage)

Yeesh said:

Hmmm... Lord knows I love computer games based on the D&D rules, but one of the hallmarks of the earlier ones was that they pretty much assumed you knew what you were doing.

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This was also my experience when I played BG as a fresh beginner. I don't quite remember, but I think BG was my first (A)D&D game after all.

I DID get lost. Well, there's the path, but I'm an "explorer" type of player, so I just didn't follow it. I even picked up both evil characters althouigh my character was naturally good.

I tried to play BG several times, and NOW I can say: It's relatiovely easy if you ALREADY know the rules / the rule system AND you you are playing like kind of an power gamer (which I am not).

So, if you know all of the rules on how to max out your character, things DO become easy. You just need to know the rules / the rule system.

Then, i didn't. I didn't know what was needed to develop my character into a formidable fighter against all kinds of enemies.

Even in my last try I managed to suvive against all sorts of monsters only with the most expensive, almost high-end eqipment my party could afford. That ignited in me the thought that I STILL must be something wrong. Because, I thought, a balanced game would allow a gamer to compete against enemies with non-expensive non-high-end items as well.

Or so I thought, having TDE as the only system I know fairly well (well, until 4th edition) as my background.

From the viewpoint of an absolute newbie, who hasn't even played with or read the (A)D&D rules AT ALL, I can understand the author's point of view.

That so many people cannot understand him just shows to me that many, many people are just (too) familiar with the (A)D&D rules.

As a sidenote: What Action-RPG totally lack is any kind of "sandbox" playing. A-RPGs are complete railroading with "ONE WAY" signs everywhere.
Considering this, it is no wonder at all to me that the author just cannot cope with the freedom a "sandbox" - type game gives him.

Having used ONE WAY signs for throughout all of the life leaves a person clueless in a world without these signs.

It also imho needs a little bit of sensitivity to actually perceive the small signs in sandbox games where it goes to, and A-RPGs don't teach sensitivity at all. Imho.

There's a grain of truth to that rant. Old-school cRPG's like BG, PS:T etc. *do* have a learning curve that's a bit like scaling the Matterhorn, and I do not think that that's a good thing. Current games do a better job easing the player into play -- and not all of them are even completely dumbed down.

A big part of the reason is the wide-open nature of the D&D ruleset: if you're not pretty good at character-building, it's all too easy to end up with a squib, after which the going gets unreasonably tough. It's a tough balance to strike, that one -- keeping it challenging even for the min-maxers while keeping the less mechanics-oriented people going. ('Cuz yeah, I think it's legitimate to think of them too.)

I've never replayed PS:T beyond the early part of the Hive, and there are good reasons for that. The early-game mechanics are just too damn tedious.

Prime Junta said:

There's a grain of truth to that rant. Old-school cRPG's like BG, PS:T etc. *do* have a learning curve that's a bit like scaling the Matterhorn, and I do not think that that's a good thing. Current games do a better job easing the player into play -- and not all of them are even completely dumbed down.

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Baldur's Gate came out when I was 11 years old. I have never been accused of being a min-maxer, and I managed to play through the game numerous times. I couldn't do that for PS:T, because I got bored of all the dialog.

I'm sorry, but if the game wasn't too difficult for an 11 year old to figure out and have the patience to stick with it back in 1998, perhaps the genre's audience has been dumbed down in the following 11 years.

Storamin said:

Baldur's Gate came out when I was 11 years old. I have never been accused of being a min-maxer, and I managed to play through the game numerous times. I couldn't do that for PS:T, because I got bored of all the dialog.

I'm sorry, but if the game wasn't too difficult for an 11 year old to figure out and have the patience to stick with it back in 1998, perhaps the genre's audience has been dumbed down in the following 11 years.

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Perhaps.

I'm speaking only for myself, though: I haven't found the patience to slog through the early game in BG to get into the meat of things. I quit BG2 early on a dozen times before finally getting over the learning curve.

I am kinda sorta proud of myself that I did, eventually get to the point where I really enjoyed BG2, that I've played FO and FO2 through several times, that I got through the early-game slog in PS:T to be able to stand in awe before its awesomeness. And I've ascended several times in NetHack without cheating, as well as been badly hooked on Dwarf Fortress, which puts me squarely among the hardcorest of the hardcore when it comes to Being Patient With Games and Not Demanding Eye Candy. So there, you graphics-whoring peon with the attention span of a gnat you.

But I still think the early game mechanics in all of those games sucked hard, the learning curve was unnecessarily steep, and it's a cryin' shame that lots of people who would otherwise certainly have gotten a hell of a kick from them never* will, for these simple reasons. That's just bad, arrogant, impolite design, and the modern games that have made serious efforts at smoothing out that curve are much the better of it.

* Except for Dwarf Fortress. That'll have its learning curve smoothed out. Eventually. Around the middle of next decade, perhaps. If ToadyOne lives. Then all you attention-span-challenged graphic whores can enjoy it too, as we who mastered it back when the screen was a letterbox of ASCII graphics smile on you benignly.

As I recall from my 3 or 4 playthroughs of BG (the first one), you will get tips on character creation and how to use spells etc. during the game's loading screens.

There's a whole section on how to build your character in the game's manual, explaining that a mage needs high intelligence and a cleric needs high wisdom?

That said, if I didn't have a co-worker that came over and helped me with the strategic part of the combat or had found the Bioware (or Interplay at that time) boards, I would have been somewhat in the dark, too. Especially in that spider area around the Cloakwood mines, I think?

The first area after leaving Candlekeep is fairly easy, if you do what the manul suggests ; Imoen needs to sneak around a lot. And spot the goblins, and then she can shoot at them with her bow or crossbow.

Let's face it:
Baldur's Gate is not an FPS nor an Action-RPG. You do need a bit of strategy to beat the enemies; and one strategy is to keep your mage in the background, and you rogue (or bow-fighter) at the side. If you try and play this game like an action game, say like Halo, where you only play one character, you will get killed a lot.
You need to pick up Imoen and at least Montaron and Xzar or 1-2 other companions. And in the first ½ hour or so you should be able to make to the Friendly Arm Inn, where Jaheira and Khalid are waiting for you.

And after leavingthe city (I suppose he means the city of Baldur's Gate or maybe Candlekeep?) the game railroads you to the end of the game.

And what cryptic journal: you do have a map, you know. Just look at it to see what Beregost and the FAI is....

As for PS: Torment, I haven't played that in ages due to hardware crash some years ago, but maybe I need to polish this game off a little bit again.

I didn't die till I was ambushed at the 1st town after leaving the Keep...and then I died "repeatedly"...

Guess I should dust off my cd's (8?) and see if I've become any wiser and formidable during the years since lol

So yea, put me in the non-D&D experienced player category, that said...I found NWN to be MUCH easier to navigate and explore thus being a more enjoyable gaming experience.

But I've often thought of trying BG and see if I could discover what I was doing wrong or missing. Would also like to try BG2, guess I could put F3 away and have a retro weekend

I'm sorry, but if the game wasn't too difficult for an 11 year old to figure out and have the patience to stick with it back in 1998, perhaps the genre's audience has been dumbed down in the following 11 years.

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Yes, it has. The same way the audience for all computer games has. This is not a case of people getting stupider. Rather it's an expansion of the audience from a narrow demographic of mostly nerds who grew up with early home PCs in their houses to a much wider target audience who didn't. Nerds are smarter, regular people are dumber. But there are a lot more of them, and they pay just as much money per head for a game as we do, so it doesn't make great business sense to make games just for us any more.

If only there could be games both groups could enjoy...

By coincidence, I've been replaying BG1 recently, and I would say it is "hard". Most recent D&D games have a quick tutorial that bumps you up to 2nd or 3rd level within 15 minutes of fighting easy opponents. BG1 can take a couple hours of gameplay to make it to second level, and a first-level character is one or two hits away from being dead, and one crit away from being giblets. The first few areas have bears and ogres, and can randomly spawn archers of various races (bows are very effective in BG), and deviating from the course can easily get you to ankhegs and giant spiders.

For someone expecting the hand-holding and nigh-immortality most games present at the beginning, yes I agree BG1 is a "hard" game. That's part of why I'm replaying it (in spite of the standard biowarian tropes).

BG1 was hard at the beginning even for someone who knew the rules well. Especially if you played a mage. I remember having to do the battle at the first town you get to (where you pick up Jaheira) many, many times because someone kept dieing. I finally just ran past the bad guys into where Jaheira was (and someone else?) and with their help I could win the battle outside. I can quite easily see someone who tried it 4 or 5 times just giving up right there.

What battle? The lone mage at the stairs of Friendly Arms Inn?

With vanilla BG he's easy. Provided you have Imoen in the party, because mage will have his spells being distrupted by her arrows. But BG with tweakpacks and other enhancements, now thats a challenge, cause he casts on himself mirror image instantly and then casts magic missile's at your main character.

But overally when I got BG I have never played any D&D game, never had a chance to play any RPG game (only played games like Civilization, MoO, MoM at that time, ow and Wolfenstein) and was like 13 years old. And still I had no problems with the games. Of course I died for the few first times, but it was all the charm that came with the old games. You had to suffer before you could achieve anything. You learned by experimenting. You had to plan your character, plan your first steps. Not like today you follow streamlined stories and encounter enemies specifically designed for you to win easily.

I replayed BG a year or so ago with all sorts of mods and tweak packs, fantastic game.

I've found the priority early game is get everyone a missile weapon, shoot the enemies to death, if a big bear for example gets close, just back off while shooting. You can even use MMORPG style tactics as the bear chases one party member the others keep shooting it, if it changes target, then that person flees.

After a while and you level up it gets less necessary. So yeah I guess the game is pretty hard for those that don't know much about D&D or have much of an idea of tactics.

Personally I loved it!

Daniel.

BillSeurer said:

I finally just ran past the bad guys into where Jaheira was (and someone else?)

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Khalid was Jaheira's partner.

Daniel.

Well, it's like ... Anyone of you who has played Drakensang and has questions about the rules ...

To me, Drakensang is relatively easy - because I know the rules to some extend.

Not so much the international mainstream audience ...

This reviewer sounds like an idiot. I'd never played AD&D, computer or PnP, before picking up Baldur's Gate. I suffered none of the problems he did. As for getting lost? My guess is 1) he neglected to even look at the physical map that came with the game and 2) he never figured out to look at the in game map (probably because he never looked at the manual either).

Just sounds like the typical current gamers that want everything spoon fed to them through the game.

I also find it funny that he calls Baldur's Gate a 'cult classic.' It sold over a million copies over it's life IIRC as did the sequel.

Even worse is that Black Isle apparently made no attempt to change that for the next five or ten RPGs they made as well. And people wonder why they went out of business.

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This is particularly funny given that Interplay/BlackIsle didn't go out of business do to lack of sales of BlackIsle titles.

It's also funny to see him call Baldur's Gate ancient. I guess he'd consider the early Ultima or Gold Box games pre-historic.